Search Results for “three-alternatives-to-a-budget/budget-lesson-part-5/debt-burnout/subscribe-by-email/how-to-complain-the-squeaky-wheel-gets-the-grease/quit-smoking-my-first-frugal-move-ever/medical-costs-and-choices/budget-lesson-part-3/Clearing Up Social Debt in 3 Steps/save-your-family/travel-expenses-why-i-splurge” — Page 96

Meditation

Life is crazy.

“Really, Jason, that’s news?”

I spend so much time going in so many different directions.

Cleaning out our inherited hoarding house, managing the remodel, work, side hustles, kids, friends, family, relationships, maintaining our house, maintaining a relationship with my wife, garage sales, school starting, junior high football season, insurance policies, probate, rush hour, insomnia.

Some days, I feel insanely scattered. I can’t focus. I have a hard time making decisions. I waste time.

Those days, I need to clear my head.

That’s where meditation comes in.

I don’t do the money hum. (Om mone padme, Om)

Instead, I have three activities that demand a total focus. They drive out any scattered thoughts or unimportant concerns.

They have to because, quite frankly, they can be dangerous if I don’t concentrate.

1. I shave. I use a double-edged safety razor, so bleeding for the throat is a real concern. For 10 minutes, nothing else in the world matters. It has only recently struck me how valuable this is. That value makes me want to start shaving every day, with a straight razor. More focus, more often.

2. I ride. For the past couple of years, it’s been hard to find time get my motorcycle out. Small children seem to want attention every day. It got to the point where I was ready to sell my bike. This spring, it was seriously misbehaving. Finally, at the end of the summer, a friend got it running better than it ever has. I took it out for a couple of hours and came back feeling more clearheaded than I have in a long time. I won’t be selling my bike until I have its replacement.

3. I shoot. Shooting involves a series of simple actions that require concentration to do well. Load the gun, line up the sights, which eye is dominant, breathe, don’t breathe, squeeze the trigger, hole in the paper. Again, it’s not an activity that’s conducive to worrying about the bills or work. It’s a way to shut out the world for a few minutes.

For me, a few moments or a few hours of shutting down everything except one thing is the way to stay sane and focused.

How do you deal with it when the world comes crashing in from every direction?

Transparency

Business

A friend–let’s call him me–recently had a bit of a hangup with a business relationship.

On a long-term project, there were some unavoidable setbacks. My friend decided to work through them, hoping to get everything back up to speed…before the customer noticed.

It’s a funny thing, but customers like to look at status reports on long-term projects. A couple of months after the biggest problem, the customer called my friend wanting an in-person status update. They told him to be prepared for an uncomfortable conversation.

Crap.

Now, the setbacks were truly unavoidable. Things came up that were entirely outside the realm of my friend’s control, but he had to deal with them anyway. When the problems were laid out in front of the customer, it went from uncomfortable to a discussion on how to expand the business relationship.

Transparency for the win.

Bad things happen. Anybody who doubts this is clearly not equipped to deal in the adult (that’s adult in the “grown-up” sense, not adult in the “porn” sense) world. Companies know that bad things can happen to derail a project. They are going to be more interested in how you get the project back on track than anything else.

When things go wrong, be open about it. Your customers/family/friends/one-night-stands will appreciate not having to wonder what’s going on.

Not the Center of the Universe

Parenting, Relationships

On Sunday, I dropped Punk #3 off at a birthday party. She walked into the yard, saw her friends and took off running. I confirmed times with the birthday girl’s mother and left. I went home and had Punk #2 help me with repairs to Coffin #1. It is Halloween season, after all.

When I came back two hours later, they had just finished eating cake and were about to open up presents, so I got to hang around for a while.

I noticed some amazing things:

Fully 75% of this family’s living room was devoted to play space for the kid. As you walk in the front door, you get to see a giant pile of toys and kid-craft crap. Most of what is traditionally a gathering area was taken over by kid.
Of the dozen or so children who came to the party, close to half of the parents stayed. Really, is your precious little snowflake so endangered by her friends that you can’t come up with something better to do that watch her play with her friends and ignore you for two hours while under the supervision of the resident parent?
Clowns. Ok, it wasn’t technically a clown, but a guy named Mr. Fun who hands out whoopie cushions and entertains kids while wearing odd clothes counts as a clown, to me. I get it, you want your special little snowflake to have a memorable birthday, but if every party is big and over-the-top, which one will she remember? Maybe she’ll only remember a sense of entitlement.

I very firmly believe that children should not be raised to feel like they are the center of the universe. Not even to Mom & Dad. They need to know that we have lives and interests that aren’t them.

Mothers and fathers NEED to have lives and interests that are entirely separate from their children. If your entire focus for 20+years is on the lives of your little brats, what is going to happen to you when they move out? Are you prepared to abandon two decades of self-training and suddenly become your own person again?

Husbands and wives need to have time to themselves that excludes the children. When the monsters finally leave, you need to be able to have a relationship that doesn’t revolve around who spilled what where and who’s turn is it to clean it up.

Children are not–and should not be–the focal point of a household. Leave them at a birthday party. Let them find a way to entertain themselves for a few hours. Go on a date.

I promise you, letting your kids see their parents happily doing things together–even if it’s gleefully leaving them with a sitter–will do more for their long-term well-being than knowing you’re standing in the corner at a birthday party watching her fake a fart with a 25 cent toy.

Let her be independent. Let her know that other priorities do exist for other people. Let her fall down and scrape her knees. Let her figure out how things work for herself.

That is life, after all. Let her live it and don’t forget to live it for yourself.

Oklahoma Tornadoes

News

English: A radar image of a supercell thunders... — A radar image of a supercell thunderstorm, which was producing tornado that was passing through Moore, Oklahoma at the time of the image. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My heart goes out to all of the victims of yesterday’s tornado in Moore, Oklahoma.

I couldn’t imagine hearing that my kids’ school was demolished around them. Twenty or more dead children in any community is devastating.

On top of the sheer horror of dead children, the town is nearly wiped off of the map. Will they rebuild or cut their losses?

I hope everyone in the town was well insured, but that’s never the case. There will be many in the town that will have lost everything: their homes, their families, their jobs. Family is irreplaceable, but so is your home, if you don’t have insurance. To lose it all and not even have a place to mourn….

Have you checked your insurance policy to make sure you are covered in the event of whatever natural disaster is common in your area?

To help the victims, text REDCROSS to 90999 to make a $10 donation. It’s the least you can do.

Peter Capaldi: The New Dr. Who’s Filmography

News

If you’re new to Dr. Who, one of the odder concepts in the program is that The Doctor periodically regenerates. This is a lampshade on the reality that the actors playing the lead character don’t want to be saddled with the role

for the entirety of their careers, and it allows an “in-universe” canonical way for the writers and show-runners to allow this change to happen. In fan circles, Matt Smith, the outgoing doctor, was “The Eleventh Doctor” (because he’s the eleventh actor to take on the role) and is going to be replaced, when the series comes on again, with Peter Capaldi, a Scots veteran of several BBC productions.

Capaldi returns to one of the traditions of the program – in casting an actor who’s a bit older — 55 as of 2013 – to play a 900-year-old time traveling alien. His acting career stretches back to 1983, with a role as Danny Oldsen in Local Hero. His early acting career included bit parts in the British underworld-themed dramaedy Minder, and the horror film The Lair of the White Worm, starring Hugh Grant and Amanda Donohoe.His ambitions with film include work behind the camera – he won an Oscar for Live Action Short Film Subjects with Franz Kafka’s It’s A Wonderful Life in 1995, becoming the only actor to play The Doctor to have an Oscar on his mantel. He has also written films, including Soft Top, Hard Shoulder.Back in front of the camera, his first starring role was as Luke Wakefield, in Mr. Wakefield’s Crusade, where a closeted gay man thinks he’s witnessed a crime. When that series ran its course, he did rolls as a mad mathematician (Psychos), and an angel in the film adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere.

2005 saw Capaldi’s most famous role, before assuming the mantle of a Time Lord: That of spin doctor Malcolm Tucker in the BBC series “The Thick of It,” a role he inhabited through 2012. In that role, he plays a profoundly profane director of communications for the British Government, charged with public relations, cleaning up political gaffes, and ensuring that any dirt about an opposition party member is aired at the most politically advantageous moment. His role was noted for bringing nuance and complexity to a character described as a rabid political hatchetman who didn’t carry grudges – he had them stuffed and mounted on the wall.

Capaldi has previously appeared in Dr. Who as Caecilius in the episode “The Fires of Pompeii,’ which marked the first appearance of Karen Gillan, who went on to play the Doctor’s companion, Amy Pond. Later, he returned to Dr. Who spinoff Torchwood: Children of Earth as John Frobisher, who had a particularly dark turn, killing his own family rather than letting the 456 aliens use them as a human sacrifice.

In the press event where he was announced has having landed the role, Capaldi admitted to having been a fan of the series ever since he was a small boy. For fans of the long running franchise, this promises to be a very enthusiastic incarnation of the Doctor.

Mariano Rivera: Rags to MLB Riches

Celebrities

English: New York Yankees Pitcher Mariano Rive... — English: New York Yankees Pitcher Mariano Rivera on May 25th, 2008 vs. Seattle Mariners. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Mariano Rivera is the most dominant closer in the history of baseball. His cut fastball, or cutter, is considered by many to be the best pitch in the history of the game. He is the all-time saves leader, and he has five World Series rings that he can wear. Of course, he has made millions of dollars over his professional career, which has brought him a long way from his humble roots as the son of a Panamanian fisherman.

Rivera’s journey began in Panama City. He was born on November 29, 1969. His father was a fisherman in the small fishing village of Puerto Caimito. Like almost every boy in Latin America, his earliest athletic experiences were playing soccer. However, he also played baseball as well. The area was so poor that not many people actually owned baseball gloves, bats or balls.

Instead, Rivera and his friends would play games with tree branches for bats. They used milk cartons instead of gloves, and they taped together pieces of old fishing nets to use as balls. Rivera didn’t have his first real leather baseball glove until his dad bought him one at the age of 12.

Rivera liked baseball, but he never thought he would one day make a living at it. Instead, he dreamed of playing soccer professionally like most Latinos. However, he suffered a series of ankle injuries during high school that shattered this dream. He finished school at age 16 and began working on his father’s fishing boat. He had to abandon ship when the boat capsized, and that scared him away from fishing forever.

Soon after that, Rivera started playing on a local amateur baseball team, Panama Oeste. He was the team’s shortstop, and he only started pitching because the team’s normal pitcher was in a slump. His teammates were so impressed with his pitching skills that they convinced the Panama scout for the New York Yankees to give him a tryout. Rivera went to Panama City for a Yankees tryout camp, and the Yankees signed the man who would become one of the greatest players of all-time to a contract worth just $3,000.

When Rivera came to the United States, he did not speak English and was incredibly homesick. Puerto Caimito did not have telephone service at that time, which meant Rivera could only communicate to his family back home by writing long letters.

Rivera made steady progress through the minor leagues, but it was still five years before he was called up to the big leagues. His first few years in the major leagues, Rivera made the minimum salary of $750,000. This is a small figure by American standards, but it is more money than most people in Panama can dream of.

Rivera still goes back to Panama every year. He feels it is a home and that he is a part of it. His riches have never transformed him into a diva. He is one of the most down-to-earth and genuinely friendly players in the game.

Related articles

Related articles

Related articles